global access to the internet for all (gaia) -...
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Arjuna Sathiaseelan Networking for Development Lab
University of Cambridge
17 March 2016
Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA)
www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~as2330/n4d/
@asathiaseelan
arjuna.sathiaseelan
Internet Penetration Map
Influenza – 250,000-500,000 deaths annually [Ref: WHO] Cholera, Malaria, Flu, Dengue Fever, Small pox and many more…. 0.6 doctors for every 1000 people in India!
Motivation 1: Health
Evidence on link between health literacy and mortality rates suggests that access to internet has the potential to save ~2.5 million lives
Extending Internet access has the potential to increase life expectancy for >2.5 million people affected by HIV/AIDS
Reduction of Mortality Rates
Improved health information to expecting mothers and health workers could lead to a reduction of child mortality, saving 250000 children who may otherwise have died during their first year of life
.
Reduction of Child Mortality
Motivation 2: Education
Motivation 3: Economic Impact
Internet access as an enabler for human rights
Internet is an important (potentially life saving) enabler Communication, Health, Knowledge, Economy, Governance
..and the human right argument
ISOC 2012 survey with 10,000 users in 20 countries 83% agreed or agreed strongly that access to Internet is a human right 2/3 agreed or agreed strongly that the Internet would play a Significant role in solving global problems:
Reducing child mortality (63%) Improving maternal health (65%) Eliminating extreme poverty and hunger (61%) Preventing trafficking of women and children (69%)
The Internet
Geographic
Conventional Internet access has physical limitations Not economically feasible for a network operator to provide coverage
Economic Access to fixed broadband in some developing countries costs almost 40x-100x the national average income In developed countries, affordability limits broadband access in impoverished communities
Regulatory, Social & Capacity building challenges
Internet access is challenged
How big is Africa?
Connecting Africa
Affordability
Why has 3+ decades of progressive Internet research failed to solve these challenges to make the Internet universally accessible to all? What have we overlooked? And why have we overlooked? And now how do we solve it?
Some questions..
Need increased visibility among the wider community and foster collaboration
Workshops, projects, papers, IRTF drafts Understand what are the costs and how do we reduce costs (10x reduction in access costs especially in geographies and populations with low Internet penetration) Report deployment experiences to better understand
what technologies/protocols work what are the challenges in terms of adoption
Longer term: Input to standards à stacks à adoption
IRTF Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA) Research Group
IRTF Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA) Research Group
Official page: https://irtf.org/gaia Mailing list: https://irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/gaia
Chaired by Arjuna Sathiaseelan (UCAM) & Mat Ford (ISOC) Plan is to meet twice a year (minimum) GAIA meetings
IETF London 2014 Cambridge 2014 ACM DEV 2014, San Jose IETF Prague 2015 ACM DEV 2015, London ACM SIGCOMM 2016, Brazil
Community has grown to 350+ members
Key Topics
Measurements and deployment experiences Understand the challenges Research opportunities: better measurement tools, incentives for tech adoption à infrastructural solutions à usecases for new architectures, regulation and socio-economic models
Alternative network deployments Wireless Internet Service Providers (reach) Shared infrastructure (reach, costs to an extent) Decentralised networks/services (Community-led): non-profit (costs + reach) Research opportunities: access tech, localised comms (ICN, NFV), management (SDN), socio-economic models, regulation
Key Topics
Protocol and architectural fixes There are many: which/what works? What should we change (for e.g free aps à ads à multiple TCP conns, HTTP/2, large initial windows etc) Opportunities for new protocols/mechanisms to emerge or to co-exist)
Capacity building & Impact Wider dissemination of the results is important Organisations like the ICTP, NSRC, A4AI..
The longer term vision ITU study group for GAIA? We need a Center for GAIA (hub & spoke model) R&D, training and deployment Several opportunities for development (5G, IoT and big data) Momentum within the EU (>8 million of funding raised on GAIA related projects in 2014-2015) More opportunities -
Decentralised networks 5G for rural/remote EU-Africa/SE Asian initiatives